WRC
France's rising WRC star introduced the Ford Puma Rally1 to the crowds at Goodwood. Respected motorsports journalist David Evans went along for the ride.
Adrien Fourmaux wanders through a building on Saturday morning at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. There’s the odd second glance, but he’s largely untroubled. He looks like a fan. Because he is one.
A Festival first-timer, he’s taking it in. Loving it.
He arrives in West Sussex from Africa, having just won his first ever stage in the World Rally Championship and finished fourth on the road. Fourth turned to fifth after he was whacked with a time penalty for a cheeky cut across one section of a Safari Rally Kenya stage.
Fourth, fifth, he’s not overly bothered. He shrugs the shrug of a 26-year-old whose only interest comes in the classification three or four places higher.
The stage win was nice though.
“I was waiting for that one,” he grins. “I’d come close a couple of times, but Séb kept beating me! It was nice that it came on the 100th stage of the season.”
Séb is, of course, France’s incumbent King of WRC: Sébastien Ogier.
With Ogier insisting that he really will walk away from full-time WRC employment at the end of the year, French rally fans have been rightly concerned about the future. For a generation, they’ve known nothing but success. Usually dominant success. For 16 of the last 17 years, the Tricolour has flown higher than anything else; La Marseillaise has provided the soundtrack to nine title-winning Sébastien Loeb campaigns and seven (so far) for Ogier.
Now it’s Fourmaux’s turn.
But first, he’s got to find a way through the nine corners and 1.86 kilometres (1.16 miles) which constitute Goodwood’s famous Festival of Speed hillclimb. Fortunately, he’s been presented with M-Sport Ford’s very latest rally weapon – the Ford Puma Rally1. The prototype represents the very sharpest of cutting edges in the World Rally Championship. Revealed to the public for the first time just two days earlier, this car comes complete with a hybrid package which will make next year’s Rally1 category the fastest rally cars of all time.
Unfortunately, it’s raining.
“Today,” he says on the start line, “it would not be good to crash this car here.”
There’s never a good time, but dropping the Puma in front of hundreds of thousands of fans and one Ford Motor Company CEO in the shape of Jim Farley (who landed into the Duke of Richmond’s back garden just minutes earlier) would be particularly inopportune.
I’m tempted to remind Adrien of this as we hurtle out from beneath the trees and into the first corner, a Teflon right-hander which surely deserves a touch more caution than this.
He palms the gearshift forward one cog, feeds in some steering angle and gets back on the throttle with not as much as a wriggle from the car.
These 2022-specification cars are something of a juxtaposition. The return of the five-speed sequential gearbox comes at the cost of paddle shifts, active transmission and much of the aero – all of which has been binned in an effort to contain tech, costs and speed in these cars.
The flip side of that tech turn down is a 100kW electric motor and 3.9kWh battery.
The combination of those offers Fourmaux an extra 100bhp when he fancies it.
“We have the boost for just a short period [three seconds],” he said. “For the drivers, we'll have to decide where to use it. Of course, you'll want it from the start line. When you start with high grip on Tarmac, the launch from the line is… it’s amazing!”
The road ahead is anything but high grip, but the Ford remains resolutely in line under Fourmaux’s control.
“There was one section, in the middle of a right-left sequence,” he says, “where I got the full electric boost – it was interesting. Did you feel?”
I didn’t.
“It’s really slippery. It’s fantastic to see all of these beautiful cars coming up the hill, but some of them are on some really old tyres and they make the road really dirty.”
Cresting the top of the hill, there’s the usual huge crowd waiting to receive the latest missile to make it out of the tree-lined finish. Fourmaux raises by far the biggest cheer with a pair of perfectly executed donuts. Stepping out of the car, there’s the briefest of waves. Fourmaux’s from the Loeb-Ogier school of humility.
“It’s nice to see so many people here,” he said. “It’s a really nice and cool event, but, for me, it’s another chance to drive this car. I love this [2022] car. I've driven [it] a lot, done a lot of testing in it and it’s just incredible with the power.
“For the [lack of active] transmission and things, I don’t mind. I'm still driving a Rally2 car a lot and this one has the five-speed gearbox and much less aero. Sometimes, the aero can take you by surprise. When you go from Rally2 to a World Rally Car like we used in Safari, you have a lot of aero grip and the corner speed is amazing! But then you come down to Rally2 and you don’t have the same downforce. I did this in Sardinia, you go to the corner, turn in and remember very quickly that you don’t have the same aero!
“These are different cars to drive. Without the active [transmission], you're busier as a driver and you have to manage the hybrid for the boost and the regeneration. Next year will be different.”
And the start of a new chapter. It’s a faster-than-ever-WRC chapter where French hopes sit on shoulders not belonging to a Sébastien for the first time in almost two decades.
If an electrically charged run up a soggy stretch of West Sussex asphalt is anything to go by, it’s going to be a thriller.
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